I love the World Cup. It may be, along with that first summer of Pokémon GO, the closest we’ll ever get to attaining world peace.
I first became aware of this sporting event as a new soccer player who began playing in middle school. “You’re not going to be tall enough for basketball, Emily,” my 6-foot-3 father told me. “If you want to play a team sport, you need to switch to soccer.”
My dad had been a traditional American athlete growing up, playing baseball, basketball, and football. But he loved all sports and even dabbled in intramural soccer while attending the University of Alabama in Huntsville.
One day, right before the summer of '94 got underway, he proudly announced that he had bought our family tickets to the World Cup. He had splurged on a ticket package with 20 total tickets—four seats to five group-stage matches in Orlando. My mom was initially appalled by the amount of money he spent, something close to $2,000. It was a lot of money for our family to spend on sporting events (though nothing close to the exorbitant ticket prices today).
I don't think any of us, not even my dad with the foresight to buy those tickets, realized what exactly we were getting into. We drove to Orlando for the first match on June 19, 1994, to watch Belgium defeat Morocco.
A few days later, on June 24, my family ended up at what was dubbed "the largest cocktail party in the world" after Mexico's 2–1 victory over Ireland. Both teams took over Church Street and partied all night. The next day, we watched Belgium beat the Netherlands, and later saw Morocco defeat the Netherlands as well.
On July 4, 1994, I attended the one and only Round of 16 match in Orlando. The Netherlands' Oranje fans went absolutely nuts with their wooden shoes, orange tulips, and funny chants as their team defeated Ireland 2–0. I bought a bootleg T-shirt with an orange lion dribbling a soccer ball on the front and the words, "If you ain’t Dutch, you ain’t much" on the back. I wore that shirt to almost every high school soccer practice I had. My teammates used to tell me they got tired of reading it while I pushed the pace on our mile runs.
Thirty-two years later, the World Cup returned to the United States, and once again people packed the stadiums and embraced the festive atmosphere for 39 wonderful days. I bought an unofficial poster, riddled with typos, to keep track of the now-expanded 48 teams in the group stage and the knockout bracket. I bought country flags for every team in the tournament, and we spent days at GRHQ playing our own version of World Cup soccer and watching the matches together. I was one of those people who watched as many games as possible, sometimes three in a single day. It was a lot of soccer.
My fellow mom friends and I fell in love with the Haaland and Bellingham bromance and all the other stories that emerged throughout the tournament. My kids, who have eschewed playing soccer despite my best efforts, also fell under the World Cup spell. They spent halftime taking penalty kicks against their friends in the living room and, in the process, broke one of our light fixtures.
In this 250th year of our nation's existence, the World Cup felt like a reminder that there is still something worth striving for. That we can put politics aside to be good hosts and neighbors. It wasn't just ice cubes, ranch dressing, and bottomless chips and salsa that visitors fell in love with. They fell in love with our welcoming cities and welcoming people. Someone I know said the Scottish Tartan Army's presence in Boston healed something inside them. I think that's what sports, at their best, can do. For a little while, they remind us that strangers don't have to stay strangers.
Looking back, I don't remember every score from the ‘94 World Cup. (I had to use the internet to look that up and the exact dates of the games.) I remember orange tulips, the wooden shoes, the fez hats, the Irish and Mexican songs echoing through Orlando streets, my dad smiling because he'd made the right call.
Those memories became the foundation of a lifelong love of soccer, one that eventually carried me to pitches on three other continents. And thirty-two years later, watching the tournament return to America, I realized I wasn't just reliving my childhood. I was watching a new generation discover the same magic.
